Sunday July 16, 2023 | Dan Kent
As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
This sermon provides a recap of the Unraveling Truth series, as Dan walks us through four elements of the series: Truth, God, Jesus and the Bible. He explains how these elements are related to each other and how they have implications for how we think and do day-to-day life.
In this sermon, Dan Kent looks back on what we have been discussing throughout the Unraveling Truth series. He opens with a clip from The Twilight Zone that highlights some of the human experience that often leads to doubt of God, things like the nature of what is true, who we are and why we exist. He uses this as an entry into a summary of four basic elements that we have addressed during this series.
The first element is the nature of truth, where we asked questions like, “Can we trust that there is such a thing as absolute truth?” and “What is the relationship between science and faith?” The second set of sermons dealt with the topic of God. Here we spoke about trusting God’s existence, asked what God is like and determined that God is inherently relational.
From this point, we moved into the third element: a conversation about the ultimate revelation of this relational God who manifested himself as love in Jesus. The final element was the Bible. In this part of the series, we wrestled with questions related to the trustworthiness of Scripture, the discrepancies found therein, and the role that Scripture plays in our faith.
Dan walked us through each of these elements as a part of what he called the River of Truth because they are integrally connected and one leads to the next. This truth, he argues, is not merely a set of facts that can produce dead knowledge that is irrelevant to life. It is living truth because it is truth about a living God who demonstrates what is true for life and how we live. This kind of truth calls us into profound invitation and prompts action. God did not merely provide data for us to ponder. God gave all of himself to us so that he might dwell with us and we might dwell with him.
The call is into a covenant relationship, a pouring of ourselves into God’s life and others as God pours himself into us. It’s about trusting self-giving that pertains to all of life, as opposed to a contract relationship where we engage in order to get, as long as it is beneficial to us. It’s a kind of oneness with God, a union, which appears to be the ultimate goal of God’s love for us, as seen in Jesus’ prayer quoted above from John 17. May we all live into this truth today.